What Should a London Hotel Do When a Guest Reports Bedbugs?

Our service page covers what to do with the room. This is about the person standing in reception at half past eleven at night, and it is the part hotels get wrong far more often.

The First Thing: Believe Them

Not because the guest is always right — a good proportion of bedbug reports turn out to be something else entirely — but because the alternative is catastrophic.

A guest who feels disbelieved writes the review. A guest who feels taken seriously usually does not, even when the hotel turns out to have had a genuine problem. The difference in outcome is enormous and it costs nothing.

'I am so sorry — let us move you right now and I will have someone look at that room properly' commits you to nothing and defuses almost everything.

Move Them, But Not Their Luggage

Move the guest immediately, and not to the room next door. Ideally a different floor.

Their luggage is the problem. Suitcases are how bedbugs travel between properties and between rooms, and wheeling a case from an affected room into a clean one is how one room becomes two overnight.

Offer to bag the luggage, and explain why in terms that do not insult them — it is for their protection as much as yours, because the last thing they want is to take something home. Most guests accept this readily once the reason is given.

What Not to Say

• 'That is impossible, we have never had bedbugs.' You do not know that yet, and if you are wrong it is now in writing
• 'Are you sure it is not fleas?' Even if true, it reads as deflection
• 'It must have come from your own luggage.' Possibly true, impossible to prove, and certain to escalate
• Any promise about what the hotel will pay for before someone with authority has looked at it
• Anything in writing that admits or denies liability. Confirm the facts, not the fault

Sympathy costs nothing. Admissions and denials both cost a great deal, and the front desk at midnight is not the place either is made.

What to Offer

Hotel practice varies and this is commercial policy rather than anything we can advise on, but the pattern that tends to defuse matters is: an immediate move, tonight's room comped, laundering of their clothes if they want it, and a named person who will get back to them once the room has been inspected.

The last of those is the one most often skipped and the one that most reliably prevents a review. People escalate when they feel dropped.

Get the Evidence Before It Is Destroyed

Before anything is cleaned: photograph what the guest found, and if there is an insect, keep it. A small pot, a sealed sandwich bag, anything.

That specimen decides whether you have a bedbug problem, a carpet beetle problem or no problem, and it is often identifiable from a photograph before anyone attends. Housekeeping stripping the room 'to be helpful' destroys the only thing that could have told you.

Close the Room, Do Not Clean It

This is the instruction that has to reach housekeeping immediately and in plain terms, because every instinct says otherwise.

A cleaner moving a vacuum and a trolley from that room to the next one is the single most common way a hotel turns one room into a floor. The room goes out of service, the door stays shut, nothing goes in or out until it has been looked at.

Train the Night Shift, Not Just the Manager

Bedbug reports arrive at eleven at night, to whoever is on the desk. A duty manager who knows exactly what to do is no use if the person who actually takes the report is a night porter who has never been told.

It is a fifteen-minute briefing: believe them, move them, bag the luggage, do not clean the room, keep the evidence, ring this number, promise nothing.

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